Clever hack creates the first 128GB 3.5-inch floppy drive

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Once upon a time, people who wanted to exchange files didn’t upload them to the cloud, send them via email, or copy them to a USB thumb drive. Instead, they relied on floppy disks — ancient relics that held an increasingly pitiful amount of data as time wore on, yet, like bedbugs, proved nearly impossible to kill. Multiple companies tried to introduce replacement products, but neither Zip disks nor SuperDrives could kill the ubiquitous 1.44MB disk.

Geek.com has the story of Dr. Moddnstine, an enterprising hacker who decided to upgrade his ancient Aptiva case with a modern system — and hacked a floppy drive to create a 128GB storage pool as well. Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the server room, the 3.5-inch zombie rides again.

Image by Dr. Moddnstine

This can be done because — probably by chance — the pins on an SD card perfectly align to the individual wires on a floppy drive cable. That made it possible to splice a floppy cable into a USB card reader. He then bent the contact pins for the reader upwards, so they’d make contact with an inserted floppy.

Image by Dr. Moddnstine

This picture shows the disk drive with a floppy inserted. You can see the reader making contact with the SD card, which happens to fit beautifully inside the shell of an empty floppy.

The result of this insanity is a floppy drive that can read a 128GB disk. There’s a video below of the system in action — Windows has no trouble detecting a “Drive A:”, and since the floppy card reader actually connects to an internal USB port, the system doesn’t need an ancient floppy controller to function. The mod is completely invisible from the outside of the system, and the Aptiva itself has been turned almost invisibly into a Core i7-6700K Skylake rig, with modern ports and capabilities melded seamlessly with the peak of 1990s style and engineering. Beige has never looked so… beige.

I wouldn’t want to take bets on how long the system will work before the card reader contacts pull away from the mount point and stop reading the card reliably. But if you’re willing to pop the system open periodically and bend them back (and anyone willing to do this probably is), it should function indefinitely. As an added bonus, you won’t have to buy a program with 15 of these “disks,” only to discover one of them failed in the box before you even unpacked the software. Well played, Dr. Moddnstine. Well played.

A full gallery of mod changes can be seen here, but be warned: The image files are large and there are dozens, if not hundreds of them.

“Just went you thought it was safe to go back to the server room, the 3.5-inch zombie rides again”

Joel Hruska

Right.

So?

Nicolae Crefelean

Just a typo: “Just went” => “Just when”

Just went you thought people could simply report a typo, the shame strikes. :P Anyway, he’s probably a regular reader and he knows better. ;)

Riely Rumfort

International Troll week it seems?

“MaxxFordham”

Maybe so. Where do you guys go for your conventions, Riely?

Riely Rumfort

Says the one who’s comment has one aim.
To troll.

“MaxxFordham”

“Says the one [who is] comment…”? What? That doesn’t even make any sense. What do you mean by that, troll?

Riely Rumfort

Do you know what trolling is?

“MaxxFordham”

Of course. I’ve known that since *way* before I talked to the one right above me!

Riely Rumfort

You’re such a snore, here I was expecting you to define yourself.
You just had got done doing the same thing with ‘Spruce’.
A troll is someone who comments only to aggravate, as many of your comments do.
I was merely pointing out how many people had chose to leave such comments on Joel’s posts this week only to summon another troll.
Find something better to do with your time, you’ll no longer do it with mine.

“MaxxFordham”

Oh, really, snore riely rumfort? Why would I do such a stupid thing as define myself as something I’m actually NOT, rather than the person that I’m talking to? Since when is what I was doing with spruce — just asking him what the hell he meant by something, and then defending myself against his idiocy when he gets all butt-hurt over nothing, supposedly “trolling”?
No, what *(bold)you’re(/bold)* doing is trolling by being a butt-hurt idiot for no good reason when you have a fake issue with the people above you for their desire to have their concerns with the article cleaned up. What they were saying is not troll language; your having a problem with it IS.

“MaxxFordham”

….says the idiot who doesn’t even make sense because he says stuff like “who is comment.”
Oh, really, snore riely rumfort? Why would I do such a stupid thing as
define myself as something I’m actually NOT, rather than the person that I’m talking to? Since when is what I was doing with spruce — just
asking him what the hell he meant by something, and then defending
myself against his idiocy when he gets all butt-hurt over nothing,
supposedly “trolling”?
No, what YOU’RE doing is trolling by being a butt-hurt idiot for no good reason when you have a fake issue with the people above you for their desire to have their concerns with the article cleaned up. What they were saying is not troll language; your having a problem with it IS.

First, it’s a 3.5-inch floppy, not a 1.44-inch floppy. Second, the capacity of the original ubiquitous 3.5-inch floppy was 1.44mb, so if he put a 128gb SD card in this, it isn’t 100x the original size, it’s 91,000 times the original size. Not trying to be a dick, but I lived through those dark times… I’ll never forget installing games that came on 20+ floppy disks.

tanilas

Thank you. People write whatever nowadays..

Joel Hruska

You’re right. Whoof. I too, lived through the dark times. Apologies for the error.

Nicola Battista

the first ones were 720kb, not 1.44mb. :D

Gustavo López Agüero

a way better hack was to take a 720, make a little hole and use it as 1.44….that was a useful hack.

Paul Linkins

No, the early 3.5 inch ones were usually 360kB or 400kB.

Nicola Battista

I remember 5 1/4 floppies with 360K capacity, not 720K … but I may be wrong ;)

“MaxxFordham”

Some were only 160-180K per side, even.

Happy “Leap Day”!

Thomas Anderson

Actually, in 1967, the first floppy disk was made. It was an 8 in. “memory disk” that had a capacity of 80 kilobytes.

Nicola Battista

I was referring to 3.5″ not 5.25″ or 8″… I’m aware of those… have a lot of 3 and 5 inch disks, and a few 8″ ones too.

duoboy

The first ones was 360kB/one side

Johan Krüger Haglert

Also why the fuck would the pins for the floppy just happen to be able to read an SD-card with no drivers (maybe because of compatibility ..), let alone this is connected to USB! (by adapter?) There was no additional work to make it show up as A:?

Nicolae Crefelean

I made the same mistake (1.44″) yesterday, while chatting with someone about the old storage technologies. It just shows how easily we can mix memories when they’re no longer fresh. I recognized the mistake about 2-3 seconds after I pressed Enter and looked at it with a crooked eye, but it was already out in the chat. :P Oh well…

Fast_Turtle

Forget 3.5 inch floppies. How about 12 inch floppies that only held 128k. Alternative is 5 inch floppies holding TRSDOS on them (still have the working TRS80 with 64k – isn’t that all anyone needs?)

“MaxxFordham”

LOL, 12″ floppy disks? Even the widest Bernoulli floppies are only 8″, as far as I can find, and those hold a lot more than 128K/side. Standard floppy disks are only as wide as 8″ too, and if I remember reading right, those could be as low as 80K.

t.j.

Yes, 8″ dual floppy drives were THE way to store documents on an old Wang-writer that was built into a desk all its own back in the day. But hey, you could store hundreds of typed pages on each one!

“MaxxFordham”

Probably not hundreds, because remember, 1 character is 1 byte. Those 8-inchers could only hold around 128KB, give or take several. How many small characters can fit on one page?

Mr_Blastman

131072 characters per 128KB and at an average of six characters a word 21,845 words… At an average of 250 words per printed page, that comes out to be 87 or so pages.

Though… these days you might find about 350 – 370 words per page using Times New Roman so that’d work out to be just shy of 61 pages.

“MaxxFordham”

Yeah, that sounds about right. Or you could even figure up an average number of characters per full 8.5″ X 11″ page at 12-point Times and get it really accurate. Although… hmm, I don’t really know how the bytes per amount of size works on fonts that are different sizes from that, nor do I really know if 12-point fonts really have only one byte per character. But in the really old days of personal/home computers, one character was…

…Ahh…wait a minute, here…. I remember back in the days of playing around with customizing fonts on a Commodore 64/128 that even one *line* of dots in a character was a byte, I think (row 1: 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, and 1 — 8 bits –; then row 2: so on and so forth, until you filled 8 rows), so now I’m confused as to how to remember that. Hmm… I guess I’ll have to go do some refreshing research.

Happy “Leap Day”!

zaxthealien

20+ . . . wow, what game was it?
I only remember installing 2 games with 3.5-inch floppy, and they were 3 disks and 2 disks. The Ducktales and Raptor: Call of the Shadows. Great games.

omatsei

Honestly, I can’t even remember anymore. I know it was a regular occurrence though, because I was (still am) a huge gamer, so I installed a lot of games. My first guess would be something like Civilization 2, maybe? I played a lot of the Sierra adventure games too, so it could have been some of those.

Funny story, I had a CD-ROM… but it was a 2x with a caddy that popped out completely, and it was SCSI. For whatever reason, it never worked right, so if I could, when I bought a new game, I would have to get the box set with both CD and disks. Most of the time, I just used the disks anyway since the CD was such a piece of crap. I’ve worked in IT now for about 20 years now, and I still hate SCSI because of that experience.

zaxthealien

ahhh SCSI . . . that abomination, ONE bent pin and say goodbye . . . and the pins were easily bent . . . I’ve had bad experiences with that thing.
After those 2 games, I got a PC with a CD ROM, IDE(PATA) one, not SCSI.

t.j.

Time Zone was the biggest that I can remember; more and more floppies for each epoch of the game. And that was with ‘compressed’ graphics, or what passed for graphics back then.

Techutante

When my friend pirated Doom 2 for me it was 22 floppies if I recall. A lot of them were re-purposed AOL free disks.

Techutante

Installing windows 95 from 26 disks on 25 computers. By the time the last disk was installing in the first PC, the first disk was installing in the last one. Good times.

I wish someone would just start making floppy drives and floppy disks and CRT monitors again. I’d buy them for my retro projects.

Mr_Blastman

Old 1980s era CRT monitors are a treasure.

Jason Merk

someone has too much time to waste. We already have sd card readers. Why would i want to jury rig something that already works. Furthermore floppy disks are way bigger than an sd card. Lastly i am finding that i am using sd cards even less now. I keep a few thumb drives around for system installs and that is about it. Everything else is online now.

“MaxxFordham”

Not everything else is online now, actually.

Have you never heard of doing a project just for the fun of it — just to be playful? You don’t have to like it and it doesn’t have to make perfect sense just for someone to enjoy the challenge of building something frivolous like this.

scyfox

First: Nostalgia
Second: SD cards are way too easy to misplace or break.
Third: Sorting SD cards is a bitch. You ain’t got place to put a sticker or even a micro label on it. Against the wide rectangular space that floppy disks had.
Fourth: Incognito Mode- The best way to hide a secret is in plain sight.

“MaxxFordham”

Well, standard SD cards do have a tiny, sub-postage-stamp-sized area for a label. But micro-SD cards… ughh, good luck! You can barely put 2 dots on one of those before you run out of room!

Goldminer

April fools test.

“MaxxFordham”

February 26 test.

Chris Daly

I wonder what the DTR is on this?

“MaxxFordham”

We don’t know you well enough to confirm if you do or not. It’s better if you just *tell* us that you wonder instead of asking us.

Chris Daly

Really? Because I used a question mark? Get a fucking life dude.

“MaxxFordham”

REALLY? Because I replied to your _question_ saying that we wouldn’t know the answer to it? No, YOU get a life, douchebag. Oversensitive much, troll? Wow, get butt-hurt over nothing, why don’t ya?

Chris Daly

Who’s ‘we,’ dude? You speak on behalf of the entire userbase of a website? Ego problems much? You ain’t shit dude. If you don’t know the answer, mind your own. You’re probably the kind of guy sitting in his basement, just waiting for the opportunity to stroke himself to feeling like a badass over the Internet, why the hell else would you reply to a comment to which you had nothing to offer. You’re just a sad little attention whore because mommy and daddy don’t give a shit about your retard ass.

Keep that shit off this website.

“MaxxFordham”

I don’t know who we “is,” but I suspect that we are, as a general population, people who are not mind readers who would know if you wonder something or not until you tell us. So don’t ask us; just tell us. And now, since you suspected that I sit in a basement, I have 2 things to say about that:
1. You obviously aren’t a mind reader either, because I’m not in a basement, and
2. that’s really not an insult anyway (“Ooh, being in a basement–what a ‘ridiculous’ place to be, especially if it’s a finished one!”), so you really need to work on your material.

Oh, another proof that you’re no mind reader is that you totally got it wrong about my parents, douche. But one thing about your parents is that (even though I can’t read their minds, so this is just a good guess) because of you they must’ve wished they had had an abortion (one of the few times it would’ve been an acceptable thing to do), and they’re learning the hard way now.

So, mr. oversensitive troll-ass, go and be a butt-hurt crybaby at some other place (maybe you’re familiar with facebook or the YouTube–actually, don’t go hang around those places either), because your oversensitive jerkiness just because someone doesn’t know the answer to your question isn’t welcome here, dick.

Gustavo López Agüero

As a project is OK, maybe even fun….but as useless as taking a extra thin flat screen monitor and putting it inside an old CRT.

I had a TI59 and her magnetic cards, small red bright LED display. I wonder how much memory After entering and checking the program I let it on for several days to solve a Laplace equation using finite differences… but I got the results! That I had to copy one by one… LOL…
Happy Leap Day

Andrexx

Taught myself BASIC on a 4K CoCo. We did the “Power LED” mod, and memory upgrade, and modded a standard cassette recorder with a switch so we could rewind the tapes without pulling the control plug. Good times! Lol!

random_name

I wanted an answer to that question, but instead you’re just spewing garbage.

Stoney Huff

He mentions “SuperDrive” without explanation – Apple’s new floppy drives allowed 1.4MB (!) on a floppy disk. Maybe he meant the SuperDisk – available in PCs 20 years ago, or the
“SuperDisk USB Drive for MacIntosh” – as Apple users find no floppy drive for the 1998 iMac. An astounding 120MB on a diskette in 1997 with 240MB later.
“The design of the SuperDisk system came from an early 1990s project at Iomega. It is one of the last examples of floptical technology, where lasers are used to guide a magnetic head which is much smaller than those used in traditional floppy disk drives.”

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